You are my great-great grandmother. I have been on an intense hunt for you for many years. What was it that attracted me to you? Your exotic name, the absence of any evidence of you in the records - official or family? The idea of you coming to the Swan River Colony, willingly, when your adult life was just beginning. There are many questions still unanswered - I'll have to make up those parts, but I have found you. Your handwritten letters, your strength, and what happened after 1877. I found your death certificate, your marriage certificate (in the opposite order). You died here and, hopefully, you were happy. |
storing memories It wasn't a catastrophe. The two girls, sisters, Brina and Esther, hopped on a ship and came to Australia in 1853. They held onto their memories of family at home, and they replicated the best parts in a new and disordered place. Because records are kept in this way, I have only the name of the father of Abraham and Brina and Hannah and Esther Israel, in that order, without their mother's name. Samson Israel. Furniture Broker. Residence: 7 Constitution Row, Gray's Inn Road. Elsewhere named as Gray's Inn Lane. I have found it on the map of London, seen it noted as a current address of the Open University. In these records, I am given, in its flourishing script, the Hebrew names of all of these children. Born between 1831 and 1836. Mother nowhere named. |